44-52-2011: Bursting Balloons

Have you ever had someone take something intangible from you?  It’s not easy to explain, but it hurts, even more so when it is a friend, and in the end they manage to damage the friendship, but they probably won’t understand what they did, mainly because even you can’t really put your feelings into words. It’s not like one little thing does it, more like one little thing becomes the last thing you can deal with. It’s all the little things that added up. There is the over-compensating, the over-intensity, the over-achieving, the over-friendliness, over-analytical tendencies, the over-enthusiasm. It’s overwhelming and gets uncomfortable. When they show up in the same places, use the same words, curry the same friendships, want to do the same things you do and dress the same way to do it. When they cry on your shoulder about finances and the future, and then the next moment they spend, spend, spend on things that are luxury items, it becomes too much eventually. Sort of like a woman I knew, back when, who so desperately wanted marriage that she drove every boyfriend away because she was so intense. There is a point, somewhere between someone trying something out, and trying to squeeze every last drop out of an experience, a point where they can end up alienating the very people they are trying to connect with or emulate. And you know that they just don’t have a clue as to what they have done and, sadly, history has a habit of repeating itself because they fail to look inwards. In an attempt to be hyper-aware of everything, they don’t seem to be really ‘aware’ of themselves.

A wedge is driven into the friendship and you feel somewhat used, as if an experience you were holding out for and looking forward to was been taken from you. It makes you remember why you keep things to yourself and don’t open up to people very much – they might take from you those completely intangible things that mean so much, and somehow betray an unexplainable trust. You feel stepped on, at the mercy of someone’s selfish need to have everything immediately. Like someone stole your highly anticipated ice cream cone right out of your eager hands because they had to have it first. You feel like a child again, but sometimes our most basic inside wants and needs are childish. And sometimes you can’t explain why something someone has done feels cruel any better than that.